Spring: Integrating iBATIS

iBATIS seems to get left out of a lot of discussions of object-relational (OR) frameworks, often in favor of the very popular Hibernate. But as Spring: A Developer's Notebook authors Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland note, iBATIS walks a very different path than many OR frameworks: "iBATIS makes no attempt to hide SQL from you at all. In fact, it embraces SQL."

But don't be afraid: with the responsibility of SQL comes some significant power, and Spring is designed to make iBATIS easier through the use of templates. In this excerpt, the authors walk you through installing iBATIS and integrating it with your Spring application. They show you how to take SQL statements you've written and map them to beans for iBATIS' use. Finally, they discuss the advantages and disadvantages of iBATIS and why it is the way it is, calling it "an elegant compromise between full OR and JDBC."

As with all books in the Developer's Notebook series, you'll get the information in a straightforward, factual style, with the details you need to get the job done. In other words: "All lab, no lecture."